White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era (P.S.)

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2006

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-11

Part 2, Chapters 12-16

Part 3, Chapters 17-24

Part 4, Chapters 25-26

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

The Civil Rights Movement, Counterculture, and Morality

Steele argues that the civil rights era marked the beginning of a profound shift in American morality. This shift helps explain the outcome of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. If Clinton had governed in the time of Eisenhower, he would have lost the presidency and earned universal censure. Moral codes in the 1950s were simply different than those of the 1990s. During the former, a sexual transgression was a serious moral lapse, while racism was widely accepted. The reverse holds for the latter.

The counterculture that emerged in the wake of the civil rights movement fundamentally altered morality in the US. Young White rebels rejected racism, sexism, imperialism, conformity, greed, materialism, superficiality, indifference to environmental destruction, and other past evils. They sought freedom from all things associated with adults (those responsible for the evil past), including bourgeois sexual repression. This shift ushered in the sexual revolution of the 1970s. Counterculture associated sexual repression with the societal sins of old America. Consequently, sexual openness came to signify social virtue.

Changing attitudes toward sex help explain Clinton’s retention of the presidency. However, social morality played an equally important role in keeping him in office. White America’s acknowledgment of racism during the civil rights era resulted in the loss of moral authority. Social morality emerged to fill the vacuum and to restore legitimacy to White people and their institutions. Social morality demanded gesturing toward fairness and human development regardless of race, sex, or creed. American society prioritized this new social morality over individual morality. Clinton benefited from this shift. His leftist politics imbued him with social morality, rendering irrelevant his personal moral lapse. This social morality, however, also made White people responsible for the betterment of minorities, thereby stripping minorities of responsibility for their advancement and recreating old racist structures, as discussed above.

White Guilt and the Perpetuation of White Supremacy

The perpetuation of White supremacy through White guilt is a central theme in Steele’s book. White guilt emerged after Americans acknowledged the evil of racism in the civil rights years. The social order and racist beliefs of the segregation era officially came to an end. Schools, the military, hospitals, and other institutions were desegregated. White people could no longer lay claim to a divinely ordained racial superiority. Rather than proof of god’s favoritism, White wealth and power were taken as evidence of an innate capacity for evil, a “special talent for dehumanizing others on a grand scale—their will to go forth and dominate others; to steal resources; to enslave, to conquer, to convert, to exploit, to exclude, and even to annihilate others” (100-01).

As Steele argues, however, delegitimizing White supremacy expanded White guilt, which in turn gave rise to a new form of White supremacy. One of the most consequential outcomes of White guilt is the emergence of a social morality that made illegitimate racial prejudice. White guilt stigmatized White people and White institutions, including political parties, corporations, art museums, and schools.

To refute the stigma of racism, White individuals and institutions had to declare their devotion to diversity and increase the visibility of minorities. The recognition that Black people could not compete with White applicants in the job market and in education gave rise to social programs aimed at increasing minority recruitment, notably, affirmative action. Steele argues that the social programs born out of White guilt created dependency in Black people and led to the development of a Black identity based on entitlement and grievance. These programs also reinforced old ideas of White supremacy by casting White people as the only means of Black advancement. Focusing on White people as agents of change and depriving Black people from taking full responsibility for their advancement bolstered old racial structures, allowing White supremacy to “slip in the back door and once again define the fundamental relationship between whites and blacks” (147).

Black and White Responsibility

Steele identifies responsibility as a key issue for Black and White people. As noted above, White guilt made White people responsible for Black advancement through affirmative action and other social programs; it prevented Blacks from assuming full responsibility for their lives; and it led to the recreation of racist structures that cast whites as superior to Blacks.

Gregory and other second-wave civil rights leaders encouraged the redistribution of responsibility from Blacks to whites. For them, responsibility was a tool of oppression—something racist society inflicted on Black people, while denying them the opportunities to do much with it. They sought to exploit White guilt by pressuring White people to assume more responsibility for Black uplift.

The redistribution of responsibility ultimately helped White people and harmed Blacks. Taking charge of Black advancement through social programs restored moral authority and legitimacy to White people. By contrast, it cast Black people as perpetually weak. Steele argues that the redistribution of responsibility has had a catastrophic impact on Black communities. For example, education weakness remains a problem for Black people not because of systemic problems, but because Blacks reject or avoid taking full responsibility for raising their performance levels:

[W]e got remedies pitched at injustices rather than at black academic excellence—school busing, black role models as teachers, black history courses, “diverse” reading lists […] and so on. All this but no demand for parental responsibility, for harder work on reading, writing, and arithmetic. (63)

Responsibility and hard work, then, are key to Black advancement.